cadillion's comments

Agreed, forgive me for reposting from another comment, but here's our perspective:

You are correct, for this smart contract to work you need defined rules around how the money is released should either party falsely claim success or failure, so you need to rely on automation or some third party to validate fulfillment of the contract. So you're back to an oracle problem, how do I know I can trust the validator?

The nice advancement here is that anyone can be that third party! Your smart contract can explicitly identify a third party for multisig, or you can rely on a validator pool of mechanical turks instead of a licensed escrow agent, and accordingly the cost of escrow can decrease.

The nice part is that this is customizable, and built into the very rails that move money. It's a much lower barrier to entry than trying to build something like that for ACH, and that's what excites us about cryptocurrency.

Why not both? While Bitcoin was initially envisioned as a pure currency with some basic scripting features, the advent of the Initial Coin Offering (ICO) transformed cryptocurrency into an easy way to bootstrap speculative research projects in distributed compute, while simultaneously enabling new forms of scams.

So the speculation is part and parcel to making the network something worth using! We use portfolios to describe collections of wallets because it's difficult to tell whether Ethereum or Cardano is going to be the winner-take-all shared VM in 20 years. If you want your compute cycles to hold value, you better choose the right one.

Our philosophy is to choose the One Key Performance Indicator (KPI) for each cryptocurrency, and then allocate into each currency based on the relative performance of currencies that share that KPI.

For example, as a social network investor in 2004, it maybe wasn't obvious whether you should invest in Facebook, Myspace, or Friendster. But if you got a daily active user report every 10 minutes (like you do with Bitcoin), then maybe you could have moved your funds into Facebook as the users skyrocketed.

So that's why we talk about portfolios, and see them as an important part of being a cryptocurrency user.

A few things that we think really separate us from the rest of the pack:

You can trade directly on any of your exchanges through the platform

You can create your own index funds and calculate the necessary trades to rebalance your portfolio based on your settings

We support automatic balance syncing using your public keys or read-only exchange api keys

All the research and pricing is packaged in the same place, so you don't have to jump between providers

We don't currently support layer 2 syncing, but we're working on implementing a solution ASAP as it's a commonly requested feature.

In the future, once we have our licenses, we will also be introducing portfolio automation so your portfolio can track your index seamlessly.

Are there any other features you would like to see?

It is possible! But everyone has to transact in cryptocurrency, which currently cuts out a large portion of the population due to usability issues.

Rest assured, that the guiding light for our company is to make such smart contracts easier to use for everyone, and we believe that going the legitimate route under financial regulation is the right way to make that happen.

Thanks @nathias. Please let us know if you run into any issues or if you have any feature requests!

We understand the skepticism, and we're grateful for the great work that the community has put into CCXT.

We've added a lot of features around the GUI, including a portfolio builder tool that helps you create and manage your own index fund, as well as balance management and multi-exchange price comparisons.

Not everyone feels comfortable in an IDE, so we want to make these tools easier to use for everyone!

Thanks for the browser report! We'll be pushing a fix soon.

Thanks for catching that! It looks like our service-worker is breaking the page while it pre-caches the app. It should revert to a clean page once all the files are downloaded.

We're putting out a fix ASAP!

Wow, you hit the nail on the head! To point to our long term vision, cryptocurrency has the nice property of being data, but the double-edged feature of being money.

In order to tell people how to get data from point A to point B you suddenly have to be a fiduciary financial adviser! We want to take that duty seriously and help people interact with the cryptocurrency ecosystem as a trusted adviser.

If we can help you customize and interact with smart contracts and plug them into existing regulatory frameworks, then we can unlock a lot of value for everyone.

Agreed, this was a necessary step when we were a team of 3 at the beginning of the year, and we are transitioning as quickly as we can to self-managed infrastructure now that we have additional help.

If you have more concerns or recommendations, we'd love to hear them!

We support automated balance syncing currently, but we are not yet able to extract locked funds on layer 2. This is an important feature to our users and we're working on getting it out ASAP!

For now, our advice is to use the manual management in the Hedgehog wallet named after the project, or if we don't have the endpoint in our system yet, to record it as a Paper Wallet. If we don't support the wallet, let us know and we'll add it right away!

Thanks for the candid feedback. We are constantly reevaluating our educational materials based on the confusions that our customers have, and we find that the best way to generate new material is to discover where the confusion lies. We definitely could have phrased the response better.

The deeper answer to the question of education is that we're specifically seeking licensing so that we can advise clients directly and execute transactions on their behalf. This way, we can get them to try cryptocurrency features and then teach them how to manage the transactions themselves.

This means that if clients want to take advantage of storage coins like Filecoin, Sia, or Storj, they can send us a file and we can do the complicated work of managing the transactions. Then once they see their file replicated across the globe, if they see the value we can walk them through executing their own transaction manually.

These are big dreams, but we have to take baby steps to get there.

Very true, completely agreed!

Thanks for catching that. Looks like we have a caching issue for the landing page, but our live prices at live.hedgehog.app are correct.

We'll fix that ASAP!

In fact, Ian Grigg's Ricardian Contract construct was originally created with centralized enforcement in mind. To him, the purpose of these contracts was to create an immutable record of the intent of any transaction that could then be followed all the way back to its inception in the event of a dispute.

So part of the magic of the smart contract is illustrating intent from the beginning, and making that intent customizable! Oracles are still an unsolved problem, but we absolutely believe that reducing the barrier to entry for becoming or acting as an oracle will result in cost savings as the ecosystem matures.

The same can be said of centralized finance! Front-running is illegal and occasionally gets punished, but it still occurs all the time.

No system is perfect, and one should look at the trade-offs one incurs by operating under any given set of rules. We believe that a more diverse ecosystem contributes to a stronger financial system and a more resilient society, whether centralized or decentralized.

Indeed sweet urchin, may you ever hog all the hedges!

Thanks for asking us to expand! We can always write a novel, but not everyone wants to read about oracles and unsolved problems in distributed compute.

You are correct, for this smart contract to work you need defined rules around how the money is released should either party falsely claim success or failure, so you need to rely on automation or some third party to validate fulfillment of the contract. So you're back to an oracle problem, how do I know I can trust the validator?

The nice advancement here is that anyone can be that third party! Your smart contract can explicitly identify a third party for multisig, or you can rely on a validator pool of mechanical turks instead of a licensed escrow agent, and accordingly the cost of escrow can decrease.

The nice part is that this is customizable, and built into the very rails that move money. It's a much lower barrier to entry than trying to build something like that for ACH, and that's what excites us about cryptocurrency.

To a large extent, yes. We like to say that cryptocurrency is like international waters: if you have your own boat and some know-how you can easily get out there and do whatever you like. But not everyone knows how to sail! There's still a lot of need for barges and cruise liners to help average people get from port to port.

For us, we want to help people who don't really understand private and public keys to get out and take advantage of the new paradigms being built in cryptocurrency. And for people who do understand these things, we're happy to be a gateway to take advantage of the centralized infrastructure and put everything back in your control on your own hardware wallet.

As for being a market maker, our goal is to guarantee best execution anywhere. This requires some fancy footwork on our end, but even after we take the spread, we want to offer you a price as good or better than you can find on any other exchange, net of fees. And that includes DEXs! We will make all these prices transparent so you can see the Hedgehog price as well as whatever Uniswap, 1Inch, or Matic are offering.

Our business model is to make markets and connect buyers with sellers. Buyers often have different prices than sellers, and when someone wants to buy for a higher price than another wants to sell, a market maker can keep the "spread" or the difference between the asking price and the bid.

We also have additional future revenue streams that we can earn through automated portfolio management fees, tax optimization, and more.

Can you clarify what you mean by motivation/support?